


let’s hear it for the cool kids

by elliebell (Naladot)



Category: Day6 (Band)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Friendship, Gen, Loneliness, Social Anxiety, Training
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-06
Updated: 2019-10-06
Packaged: 2020-11-25 16:21:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,124
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20915000
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Naladot/pseuds/elliebell
Summary: Intro Park Jaehyung, sentimental loser.The beginnings of a band. To his surprise, Jae makes a friend.





	let’s hear it for the cool kids

**Author's Note:**

> This is a fictional imagining based on the real people but it is NOT in anyway meant to be “true to life.” It’s just fiction, and just for fun.

* * *

Jae’s best friend is his guitar. Yes, it’s starting to get weird. No, he doesn’t need your advice on how to resolve codependency with inanimate objects. Yes, he realizes it’s technically not codependency because the guitar isn’t actually dependent on him.

Yes, he’s thinking in circles.

It’s a Saturday night, hot and humid, the ancient air conditioner on the wall battling valiantly against the summer temperatures. The dorms are so quiet he can hear cars rumbling by on the street outside. The last light of dusk slants through his window blinds and he can see stripes of dark, inky blue sky beyond them. His phone rests at his side, silent.

He picks up his guitar and strums it softly.

The funny thing about moving to the motherland is how much he feels like a foster kid. Accepted for a while, unlikely to be adopted. Unable to assimilate.

No. That’s not it.

The funny thing about having been a loser in high school is that you don’t actually change. You learn some new social graces but deep down you don’t speak fluent cool any more than you speak fluent Korean.

That’s not it, either.

The funny thing about being Jae is that he leaves his phone on on a Saturday night, just in case.

That’s it.

Down the hall, footsteps. A door opens, and the air conditioner beeps on. A few moments later, more footsteps, and then voices and laughter. That far down the hall, it’s probably Sungjin and Jaebum and Jinyoung, maybe some of the other trainees, no way to be sure. He stops strumming his guitar and watches the light peter out.

He used to have this idea that he could joke his way into popularity, but he never got any laughs. He tried hanging around with the band nerds, who logically should have been his people, but found himself on the fringes of a mystifying social drama that had been brewing since middle school. He took to eating his lunches with some kids from his PE class who spent most of their time talking about Pokémon at a level of obsession way beyond where Jae wanted to go, but, hey. Better than being the kid eating lunch alone. 

The funny thing about being Jae is that he’s never quite lost hope. College was like a magical fairy land of dreams coming true, but now here he is again. Spending his Saturday nights alone.

The voices return to the hall, and the door closes. He can hear them talking, but the low volume and the distance and his mangled sense of Korean doesn’t really help him eavesdrop. Except he hears, clearly, “Park Jaehyung.” And he waits. Listening. The lights aren’t on in his room, and he runs his fingers over the strings of his guitar, silently hoping that the footsteps will turn down the hall and stop in front of his door, and someone will knock, _ what are you doing here? You’ve got to come hang with us tonight! _

Intro Park Jaehyung, sentimental loser.

Someone laughs. And then the footsteps sound down the hall, and out the door.

And, anyway. He expected that. After all, he knows who he is. The kid with a guitar for his best friend.

  
  


The trainees have their own sort of fame ranking, which Jae hates. It’s really just an unstated popularity ranking that reminds him of high school, where lunch-eating locations were stratified across the campus according to how cool your friend group was. Nothing has actually changed, here, and if anything, it’s worse.

If the ranking had anything to do with actual fame, he would have ranked much higher—but somehow, his time on _ Kpop Star _ actually seemed to subtract points in everyone else’s mind from his invisible coolness score. 

Or maybe it’s just his personality. Potentially his lack of dance skills.

He shows up to obligatory dance practice a few minutes early in order to make sure he can stake out a spot in the back corner, where his body will be mostly shadowy and indistinct in the large, floor-to-ceiling mirrors. He should be in a remedial class, as everyone else has a few years of dance classes under their belt already, but that would mean paying a dance instructor for one-on-one sessions, which would be a worthless investment. No one has told Jae this, but it’s obvious, even with the language gap.

The people at the top of the fame ranking—Jaebum and Jinyoung—don’t even come to this group class anymore. Their debut, however unsuccessful, exempts them from things like group classes and multiple project groups. A group will be built around them, and the only real question is who won’t be in it.

Spoiler alert: Park Jaehyung won’t.

Honestly, he does try to keep a positive attitude, and _ always _ puts on a bright face for others. But it’s hard not to sulk when the dance instructor walks in and his eyes graze over Jae for half a second before he looks away, irritation visible on his face. Jae wants to say _ this wasn’t my idea, you know _, but he doesn’t.

The other trainees start trickling in. Sungjin nods to him as he takes the spot next to him in the back. In spite of liking to gain attention from his dancing, Sungjin doesn’t actually like to stand out in class, where being extra won’t hide a lack of skill. A few minutes later, Brian and Mark and Bambam and Bang Chan come in, filling in the front row; then Junhyeok and Wonpil right after them. There are some other kids who Jae doesn’t really know, a few whose names he forgot and a few others who are new faces. Jackson slides in right when the instructor begins the class and leaps up beside Wonpil, right on beat.

Jas is aware that he’s gloomy, but he does make an effort. He follows along as best as he can, trying to escape the attention of the instructor, who never laughed at a joke, even if it was good. There’s a rumor going around that Brian and Mark are going to end up in that new boy group, and they’re dancing with such great concentration, faces crunched up into caricatures of seriousness, that it actually looks hilarious. Jae snickers to himself while he dances somewhat on beat.

Wrong move. The instructor barks out “Park Jaehyung! Is something funny?”

Jae stops dancing. “Uh—”

Everyone in the room stops at different times, one by one noticing the instructor has stopped, and then turning to look at him. Jae’s face flushes red.

Then the instructor shifts into dialect and asks a question that Jae doesn’t understand. He can _ sort of _ gather that it’s an insult mixed up with what he thinks, mostly due to context, is the equivalent of “why are you even here?” But potentially asking the question in a more existential way. Doesn’t matter, though, because a solid two seconds go by without Jae figuring out what he’s supposed to say.

From the front row, Brian turns on his heels. Jae notices because he’s moving his mouth in weirdly large shapes, and when he finally lets his eyes dart over to make eye contact, Brian is mouthing something, maybe an English translation. Or a fake one, if he wants to sabotage him.

“I didn’t ask Kang Younghyun, I asked _ you _,” the instructor barks.

Jae’s eyes snap back to the instructor. “I’m sorry, I don’t understand.”

“You’re not a foreigner,” says the instructor. “Don’t waste everyone’s time.”

And Jae can feel it—everyone’s precious training time being wasted so that the instructor can yell at the weak link in the back of the room. _ This wasn’t my idea, _ he wants to yell. _ I just want to play guitar! _

“But he—” Brian speaks up.

Jae looks up, surprised. He and Brian have exchanged very few words, mostly hostile, ever since he started practicing with him, Wonpil, Junhyeok, and Sungjin, and someone on staff noted that Jae was the better guitar player. He wouldn’t have ever expected Brian to interject on his behalf.

“If you can’t understand the class,” the instructor says to Jae, ignoring Brian, “Then you should leave and come back when you speak this language.”

Jae looks around the room. Except for the music still coming through the speakers, everyone is quiet.

“Fine,” Jae says. He gathers his things, and bows on the way out.

  
  


The _ last _ thing Jae expects as he pushes through the doors of the building is to hear a voice behind him calling “Jae! Wait up!”

He turns, and Brian Kang, member of the top tier of the trainee popularity ranking, is coming down the stairs after him. Jae hesitates, his hand on the door.

“There’s no way I’m going back to class,” he says. As soon as he says it, a sense of peace washes over him. He can get on stage another way, if JYP won’t debut him without dance.

“Definitely not,” Brian answers. “He can be an asshole sometimes. I think he’s just having a bad day.”

Jae blinks, trying to figure out what’s going on. “What was it he asked me?”

“He said, ‘is this all a joke to you?’ But you know, it just sounds harsher in dialect. Don’t take it to heart.”

“Ah.” Jae wonders whether Brian is lying or not, trying to smooth things over and persuade Jae to go back to class. Which he will never, ever do again.

But Brian smiles, eyes drifting toward the door. “We should go eat,” he says. “I’m starving.”

Jae doesn’t really have anything better to do. So he just says, “Okay.”

They amble down the road in silence. It’s still morning, and the streets are quiet, sunlight reflecting off the windows of the shops around them.

“Um,” Jae says. “I—thanks. For, you know. Trying to help me out.”

Brian shrugs. “He was wrong.”

Jae tries to figure out what to say next, but it’s harder than it should be, with Brian or with anyone. Sometimes the words just spill out of his mouth without his really being conscious of what he’s saying, and then he goes home later and thinks about it, imagining just what an idiot he must have sounded like. Other times, like now, the words get lodged somewhere in his head, and he’s catapulted right back to high school Jae, trying to strike up conversations in the back of Geometry class.

“I don’t think they’re going to have me debut with this next group,” Brian says, out of the blue.

Jae blinks at him, surprised by this turn of conversation. “Why?”

Brian shrugs. “They’re saying I’m not ready. It’s like every time I get close...” He trails off, his eyes flicking over to Jae’s for half a second, long enough for Jae to figure that he’s referencing the guitar debacle.

“Do you really want to be in a dance group?” Jae blurts. “I mean, no offense, but wouldn’t you be—I don’t know, wasted in a dance group?”

Brian gives him a look. “What do you mean—”

“I don’t know. I think our band thing has some real potential.” Once he says it, he realizes he means it. “If it weren’t for those jam sessions, I probably would have left already.”

Brian grins. “Dance practice is that bad, huh?”

“It’s that bad,” Jae laughs.

  
  


By the grace of God, his dance classes are terminated the very next day. “We think you’re not quite suited to joining a dance group,” explains the staff person who pulls him into an empty office to let him know, looking very apologetic, sweat beading just over her eyebrows. Jae could have told them that six weeks ago, but, you know. The pursuit of fame, and all that.

He exits the office walking lighter on his feet. To his surprise, Brian is standing at the end of the hall, leaning against the wall like he’s waiting for something.

“So,” he says. “Did you quit?”

Jae pauses. “Just dance classes?”

“Not the company?”

“No. Not the company.”

Brian pauses for half a beat, before he smiles. “I guess I’m not getting my guitar back.”

And, in spite of himself, Jae grins back. “Hell nah, man.”

Brian halfway rolls his eyes, then pushes off from the wall and gestures to Jae. “C’mon. Let’s go start a band.”

  
  


Jae sits down and takes his guitar into his hands and looks around. Sungjin and Junhyeok are laughing about something, and Wonpil stares at his keyboard in great concentration. Brian looks back at him, and gives a half-smile, as if to say,_ I guess this works. _

Jae’s guitar is still his best friend, but, well. Maybe there’s room for a few friendquaintances, too.

  


_End._


End file.
